Embracing the Competition-Cooperation Angst

Several decades of alliance research have examined management of the opposing competitive and cooperative tensions inherent to the alliance context. The firm-level mechanisms of relational governance, trust, and contracts are widely discussed, but far less attention is given to the individual members of the alliance team and their experience of the cooperation-competition tension. Similarly, alliance process research falls short of describing how managers effectively manage alliance team members so that competition does not erode alliance performance. This is an important gap, and if not managed, alliance team members can cognitively withdraw from the activities that enable benefits to their firm as well as the alliance: effective problem solving, knowledge sharing, and collaboration. Drawing upon the growing body of research on the advantages of ambivalence, “the simultaneous experience of opposing orientations toward an object or target” (Rothman, Pratt, Rees, & Vogus, 2017, p. 35), we show that when alliance team members embrace “holism”—both the competitive and cooperative orientations at the team and individual level—they can improve alliance outcomes as well as firm- level outcomes. Our theoretical model posits that harnessing ambivalence can enhance cognitive processing at the individual and team levels, promoting problem solving, perspective taking, and creativity. The psychological mechanisms of psychological safety and nested identities, along with dual compensation and knowledge sharing operational routines, are core to fully harnessing “ambivalence” to benefit both the firm and the alliance.